I wish dual CPU motherboards were mainstream.
I could then use the one I am keeping aside, during compilation/encoding tasks.

But my current computer definitely come above on everything other then the VRAM.

While people are a bit over the top. A 960 is a decade old and 3gigs literally wouldn’t be able to turn on with a large number of games released this year even on the lowest settings.

It’s objectively out of date. Hell lanythjng ess then 6 gigs frequently crashes or flat out refuses for the most part.

Your literal hard cut off is basically this year with unreal 5. Ue4 games, most proprietary engines like decima, frostbyte or dandelion all will do fine at 3gigs of vram. But they are last targeting last gen consoles as their low end. So your low end is looking back around 6-8 years.

2025 has been almost exclusively full of games that are finally dropping support entirely for that standard and the new standard is 6-8 gigs of vram minimums and 16-24 gigs of available ram not counting system utilization.

Going forward if you don’t have a 6gig card and 16 gigs of ram. You functionally don’t have a computer that can do new high end games. And fuck that’s not even a hard ask. We NEED to move the fuck on from 3gig cards and 8gigs of ram.

Hell a few games are even pushing for 8gig vram/20gig ram as the minimum. But I doubt that’s going to catch on.

Iv also come across a few Chinese games that flat out won’t install if you have a spinning hard drive in your system at all full stop. Not that you can’t install to one, it flat out won’t let you install it to any drive.

At some point we do need to just move the fuck on and accept hardware is out of date. And a full ten fucking years. Is a pretty damn good arbitrary line. Gaming is a very specific work load and it’s getting noticeable how problematic it is in multiplayer games between having allies with shit computers and good ones.

Having 10+ min wait times after your queue cause a random is working off a low end PC and a spinning drive to start a dungeon in an mmo. Is fucked.

At the moment the only noticeable problem in PC gaming is the existence of spinning drives. Least for multiplayer games.

In a lot of newer games it’s become absurdly noticeable. You have a 5 min queue then your stuck waiting 10 mins on top of that cause some dipshit is loading off a spinning drive.

It’s gotten to the point iv actually seen some Chinese games literally prevent you from installing the game at all. If you have ANY spinning drive in your system. And prevents if from booting the game if you have one in your system. Because it causes that much of a problem. Endless customer complaints of horrid queue and loading times cause your waiting on people with slow drives.

Hard drives no longer are in the just good enough group for new games. It’s been a slow transfer but we are finally starting to see a hard line being draw in the sand. And I don’t expect it to slow down at this point.

At most they have a PC and a work laptop!

That’s just waiting corporate and other entity buying powerful PC for cheap. And Valve won’t get any game sales from it.

Just like PS3 being used as supercomputer.

Most people as in the VAST majority get the cheapest thing they can find and then use it as long as possible.

You functionally are always 5 years ahead of the curve of you buy the best thing available and then use it for 5-7 years.

Yes, but mostly because most of the gaming PCs in Steam’s hardware survey are not really gaming PCs but just some piss poor spec laptops that can still run old games. Just having a dedicated GPU puts it in the top half.

The GPU in this is in the 7600 RX range of things. It’s marketed as a 1080p card. Can certainly hit 4K on older titles, and output 4K with upscaling.

Don’t expect miracles from it. It’s PS5 level hardware. But that’s good enough for most of us.

It’s PS5 level hardware that is still gonna have lower performance than a PS5 because it has too little VRAM, but hopefully we get PS5 level optimization for the hardware and for linux if it’s successful enough.

E8400 for the win! Q6600 is soo out!

12GB seems to be the sweet spot for VRAM, but I suspect the real issue is PC devs not really giving a fuck how hit runs on less than their dev kit.

But then a lot of PC gamers seem to think a game should always run at ultra, no matter how good their rig is.

And I will die on this hill: raytracing has been a colossal waste of everybody’s time and money.

Oblivion remastered too. Used a mod to turn off ray tracing outdoors only to make it playable on a 9070 xt. Frame rate still dropped to 20 fps if it rained. Never figured that one out. Gave up after one playthrough. It’s embarassing how many bugged quests there still are.

Every console does that and it’s kinda anti-competitive behavior isn’t it?

Definitely makes it harder for new companies to release enticing hardware, so i’d say so…

That doesn’t make any sense to me.

Lets waste so much manpower, hours of labor, years of development and vice versa so that we can potentially taint the goodwill of fans by taking loss after loss and relying on them buying games they’ll never play on Steam.

Consoles are a bit more careful than this.

Yeah when it’s done well and part of the aesthetic, it’s different.

Labyrinth of the Demon King is another one that comes to mind.

I get your point, but since people claim Steam is a monopoly, then by that logic they have a large swath of data on what counts as a gaming machine to the user base.

I get its not going to compete with a watercooled watt sucker, but that doesn’t seem to be the majority.

As a person that has gamed since 1983: Up until recently I was gaming on a 2013 dell mobo converted to a Core V21 case (that’s a lot of rewiring conversion --thanks dell), and using a CAD GPU.

Then work bought us new laptops with RTX cards. So graphics have improved for me.

Both of those are not hardcore gaming PCs, and this steam machine will probably outperform them.

My point being these were valid systems for gaming by a gamer. Not everyone needs an F1 car to enjoy the ride to work

Agreed, the best selling dedicated gaming system of the last few years is the Switch, which has less power than many phones.

There’s also a Q8400 btw.
That’s what is lying around now the the motherboard is not working.

If anyone knows this is steam. I belive them

That’s not how you compile fast. I mean they exist but better buy a second PC for the price. Or optimise your project, or get a build cache.

Yeah, I get it.
But what if most motherboards were just expected to have 2 slots, you know?
Of course I won’t be switching to Threadripper just for getting 2 CPUs on a single motherboard and have kept the other CPU lying around, thinking of using it for keeping all the storage HDDs, and maybe offloading all re-encoding stuff onto it.

For compilation though, I’m fine with just using my main PC, although I did look into distributed computing options, specially when using my laptop, I think I’m fine for now.

It’s more like a fleeting though that came to me a few times, when I felt like playing a game while reencoding, but was unable to properly set the CPU usage for the encoders in ffmpeg.